Twelth Night
or What You Will
peter sansom


You’re angry not because the tree’s not down
and you’re having to pack up Christmas on your own,
but because we’re laughing in the kitchen
while the pizza hardens and goes brown.

Even the baby finds it hysterical,
planted in the middle of the table
she could crawl off, waving her wooden spoon
like a funny judge while we try and save the food.

The bright boa is round the mirror,
the filched holly taped up by the door –
when the lights are wound into their box
the New Year starts tonight, and what it lacks,

cold despite the fire, the radiators full on
despite the bills. In another town
a friend sets her face against cancer;
another’s child died in the womb. Remember,

anyone could say as much, and a voice
might enter our heads, it’s waiting for us.
Of course, even while we’re playing Christmas,
Mary’s first, our new life, our new house –

the bingo with mum on Boxing day,
like inviting Eric Cantona, as Katherine says,
for a kickabout, and that famous names game
where the boys chose the friends who came

because after all they’re famous to us:
that’s now and that’s, for now, enough.
Talk sense. A voice like a cassette, as you walk
into a midnight wood. Let’s let it talk

to itself for a while, and just step out
and see where this path leads and what we get
clearing out the superstitious debris
of a year whose debts anyone can see

are only money. We’re in among
dense-dark trees which may one and one and one
displace the sense of a road the other side,
but the car’s there even so, and, just serviced,

ten years old and four below, it starts first time,
to bring us to what we have, a home.
You feel it more than me, the others
in among the senseless endlessness of trees,

and if I take the world and you for granted, I’m sorry
that I don’t just see it, that you have to tell me,
but you do have to tell me. I need your voice
so sometimes what we settle for is what we chose.

The salad’s not burnt. The rest’ll reheat
and the ‘rather fine wine’ will have time to breathe,
so we hoover round, laying the year to rest
in binbags in the cellar till the old year is the next,

keeping back the plastic santa and chewed card
that are toys now, and in under an hour
we pull up the sofa and eat, with a video in
and icecream for dessert, as if that’s everything:

Thelma and Louise, it makes us feel good,
to make that wood, while we can, into a road
that’s us, here, a film where enjoying it depends,
actually, on knowing how it ends.